Joshua Borokovsky5/05

Borokovsky is a highly established, influential artist, and a senior lecturer at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. While he is first and foremost a painter, his work involves journeys to ignored or unknown sites, journeys sometimes set up as pilgrimages. The paintings that emerge hint at the effect of the pilgrimage, rather than illustrating it. But Borokovsky also documents his journeys photographically; his art thus includes various kinds of dynamic experience and interrelations with the external world, and multi-layered, static "outcomes." The paintings, Borokovsky's main artistic "product," use gold and silver-leaf, and have a transparent quality. When confronting them in the gallery setting, viewers meet their own reflection in the paintings and are thus invited to see themselves incorporated in the spiritual journey the paintings recapitulate. Past series include paintings following a journey to the Gaza Strip, long before Israelis' attention was drawn there, and a series relating to haj' paintings, which are themselves a celebration of the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

The book, which binds together two consecutive artist's notebooks, is a photo essay of the grave sites of Muslim holy men found in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus, Jericho and more. The artist's pilgrimage is the secular pilgrimage of an urban flaneur (to borrow Walter Benjamin's use of this expression). The book's lean, simple presentation allows readers to concentrate on the architecture and aesthetics of the graves, which are often covered with fabric. The photographs are accompanied by three texts. The first, written by Borokovsky himself, concentrates on the graveyard as a Heterotopia, following Michel Foucault's concept. The second, by Israeli writer Ariel Hirschfeld, stresses the difference between the simplicity of the traditional near eastern grave and the interaction it invites, and western graves. The third text is by Palestinian-Israeli poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who brings the story of the grave jinni Turfandi and his poem titled, Maybe.